Zen and The Shutter

Pick up your camera and aim it at something you want to photograph. What do you see? Do you look at the subject and how it fits within the composition? Do you look to gauge the exposure or deviation from it? Are you consciously discussing exposure variables with yourself?

If you are a gut shooter, then you take pictures without too much analyzing—just point the camera and, if it looks right, press the shutter. There is nothing wrong with this and it's commonly called shooting by instinct. For some people, this type of shooting is the only method they know.

Others take a more methodical approach and note the direction of light, quality of light, shadows and highlights, as well as the composition. Some of the time, I shoot this way. Now, this is not to say that there isn't some instinctual imaging along the way. Usually, I can feel when I have a subject in front of the camera that's worth an image. This is especially true when I photograph people, specifically portraiture. There's a moment, suspended in time, where I slip into a state of allowing the subject to "command" me; where the subject is not thinking about being in front of a camera, but reacting to an inner thought or some other stimulus. That elusive moment is what I'm after and I need to release myself from being a photographer, remove myself from consciously pushing the shutter and just allow my subconscious to take over and press the shutter for me. If I mentally keep running through the technical details, I'll surely miss the moment.

Before this can happen, however, I need to have spent some time creating the environment. I make certain most all distractions are out of the way, maybe put on some non-intrusive music and set the lighting the way I want it.

Once I've taken this time, prior to the picture-taking-event, to eliminate as many variables as I can, I slip into the moment and let my mind press the shutter. Can I do this when I'm not in the studio?

After so many years with a camera, I can put myself in the mood to photograph without thinking of how I do it. It's natural for me. Upon reaching a location, I take some time to study the lighting—which direction is it coming from, what's the quality&mdhas;mid-day sun, cloudy, shade, evening/dawn&mdhas;what do my shadows look like and how deep are they? Where is the transition between full-on light and shadow?

This front-end analysis is necessary for me to digest the variables. Then, I make some decisions and allow the left part of my brain to rest while I put the right side to work. I can now concentrate on the composition of my subject. I can also move to shoot more from the gut than otherwise. Since I've taken the time to make the variables as much a constant as I can, I no longer need to be actively thinking of them.

I'm not so totally divorced from these variables that I fail to notice whether any of them change. If the light varies, which it does constantly, I adjust (mostly automatic). If the wind picks up, I'll need to increase my shutter speed, and so forth.

Think about Zen. In practice, you should be able to trust all that experience you've gathered&mdashthe technical part of photography, the nature of the light—knowing that your subconscious will be able to make the decision of when to push the shutter.

You can only get to this level if you've done your homework and made some mistakes. Mistakes, for the most part, are learning tools. I say "for the most part," as some are just mistakes and little or no learning comes from them. However, there are those serendipitous events, we call mistakes, that, when they happen, lead to riches of knowledge and add to your experience.

These learning events don't happen in a vacuum. They happen when you're ready to accept and assimilate them into your current abilities. In other words, you build one upon another to create your full body of experience, which then becomes the foundation for the next event.

What's the next step? Trust. For all of this to work, you must trust that that which you've already mastered has become one with you (or, to speak of it in SciFi terms; Robert Heinlein [Stranger in a Strange Land] would say "grok it." You draw upon this without the effort of making a thought. I'll state that shooting by the gut (or instinct, if you like that word better), for an experienced photographer, is not really shot-gunning, as I called it in the top of this blog entry. It's shooting while trusting the base of knowledge. It's trusting that part of you that is seeing with the "third eye," the eye inside your head. When you can learn to trust the inner eye, you begin to concentrate more on your subject, watching for the signs of your image coming into the moment, immediately before your finger presses the shutter, seemingly without effort. The time when your mind says Now!